How Optimistic Are You?
Optimism and pessimism turn out not to be opposite ends of one line
The standard measure of optimism was designed on the assumption that it is one scale with hopeful at one end and gloomy at the other. When people analysed the data, that assumption did not hold: expecting good things and expecting bad things behave as two separate habits, only weakly related. You can be a person who genuinely expects things to work out and also braces hard for them not to - and that combination explains a lot that a single score cannot.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you generally are, not about this week. Optimism moves with circumstances and a hard month is not a personality.
What it measures
Two habits of expectation, scored separately. Optimism is how much you expect good outcomes. Pessimism is how much you expect bad ones. They correlate negatively but only weakly, which means your two scores can be high together, low together, or anything in between.
Based on: Life Orientation Test-Revised (Scheier, Carver & Bridges, 1994)
Possible results
Optimism
How much you expect things to go well.
Pessimism
How much you expect things to go wrong.
Common questions
Can both my scores be high?
Yes, and it is a recognisable profile: people who hope hard and prepare for the worst at the same time. That combination is exhausting to carry and it is not irrational - the two expectations are doing different jobs, one keeping you trying and the other keeping you covered. Being high on both is also the main reason the single-score version of this test feels wrong to so many people, because it averages the two into a meaningless middle.
Is optimism something you can build?
Partly. Dispositional optimism has a substantial heritable component and is fairly stable, so nobody should expect to relocate themselves on this scale by deciding to. What does move, and moves usefully, is the pessimism side: the habit of running the failure case is a habit, and it responds to the same things rumination responds to. The most reliable route is not thinking more positively but accumulating evidence - having actually coped with something raises the expectation that you will cope with the next thing more than any amount of encouragement does.
Is pessimism always bad for you?
No, and the useful distinction has a name. Defensive pessimism is setting low expectations and then working hard to prevent the outcome you fear, and people who use it perform as well as optimists do - interfering with it by forcing them to think positively actually makes their performance worse. The version that costs you is the one where the low expectation leads to not trying. Same expectation, opposite behaviour, and the behaviour is the part that matters.
Sources
- Scheier, M. F., Carver, C. S., & Bridges, M. W. (1994). Distinguishing optimism from neuroticism: A reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2010). Optimism. Clinical Psychology Review.
- Glaesmer, H., Rief, W., Martin, A., Mewes, R., Brähler, E., Zenger, M., & Hinz, A. (2012). Psychometric properties and population-based norms of the Life Orientation Test Revised (LOT-R). British Journal of Health Psychology.
An honest note The instrument this is adapted from was built to measure one thing, and it turned out to measure two. Its authors treated optimism as a single scale running from hopeful to gloomy; repeated factor analyses since have rejected that one-factor model in favour of two correlated factors, with the correlation between them at roughly minus point two to minus point three. That is weak enough that scoring your optimism and pessimism separately, as we do here, gives you more information than the single total most versions of this test report. Worth adding: these scores move with circumstances more than personality traits usually do, so a result taken during a difficult period is describing the period as much as you.